Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

Wednesday 14 January 2015

The European Union Times


Posted: 13 Jan 2015 02:49 PM PST


​The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, the fourth largest local policing agency in the United States, has taken another step towards building the biggest biometric database outside of the FBI’s by inking a new $24 million contract.
NEC Corporation of America, a Texas-based IT firm that provides biometric services to commercial entities, law enforcement groups, and governments around the globe, announced on Monday that it’s been awarded a multi-year contract by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department to provide the agency with specialized, state-of-the-art policing services, including high-tech facial recognition software.
Previously published paperwork out of the LA County Board of Supervisors reveals that the Sheriff’s Department requested approval last year for a $24.4 million contract with NEC that would provide the agency – the largest sheriff’s department in the US – with biometric identification services for six years. The board authorized that request in December, setting the stage for NEC to soon provide area law enforcement with a new toolkit with regards to investigating criminal activity and tracking down suspects within a jurisdiction that includes roughly 2.6 million residents.
According to a statement put up by NEC Corp. this week, the deal will allow the LA Sheriff’s Department to access fingerprint, palmprint, face, voice, iris and DNA matching capabilities offered through the company’s Integra ID 5 Multimodal Biometrics Identification Solution (MBIS), as well as the NeoFace program touted by NEC being the “most accurate facial matching product” available in the world.
“NEC’s experience in offering such solutions, their leading fingerprint and facial recognition technology and their ability to meet our business continuity and disaster recovery requirements, all under a flat monthly fee, were among key advantages of the NEC offering,” Lt. Josh Thai of the LASD said in a statement explaining the agency’s decision to offer the contract.
According to an analysis published by the Center for Investigative Reporting last year, the database being offered to the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department, once complete, “would augment the county’s existing database of fingerprint records and create the largest law enforcement repository outside of the FBI of so-called next-generation biometric identification.” It is scheduled to be fully installed and operational within three years, according to the Center, although other reports have indicated it may take only half that.
Raffie Beroukhim, vice president of the NEC Biometrics Solutions Division, added in a statement that the company’s products “will enable LASD to solve even more crimes and serve the public safety and security needs of citizens of Los Angeles County for years to come.”
According to NEC, the biometric service being leased to Los Angeles law enforcement interfaces with databases maintained by outside agencies, including state, city and federal police groups such as the California Department of Justice, the Western Identification Network and the Next Generation Identity (NGI) – a system that the FBI elevated to operational status last September, allowing cops in Southern California to quickly, in theory, ID a suspect caught on closed-circuit surveillance cameras with any millions of images on any linked repository.
Lt. Thai, the Sheriff’s Department employee tasked with implementing MBIS for LA County, told The Epoch Times last year that law enforcement officers won’t collect biometric data on innocent Los Angelenos, but rather on individuals that have been arrested and booked in county jail or any of downtown LA’s holding centers. Criminal charges don’t always lend to successful convictions, however, meaning potentially millions of records pertaining to non-criminal Californians stand to end up in the database and thus at the disposal of the nation’s largest sheriff’s department.
As RT reported previously, the FBI’s NGI system has been built up at a cost of $1 billion over the last several years, with the goal of letting federal investigators easily access a database containing over 100 million individual records that may ink a person’s biometric data – like individualized fingerprints and face scans – with personal information including home addresses, age and legal status. Allegations concerning an absence of oversight and proper privacy protections have alarmed digital rights advocates, however, and DC-based watchdog the Electronic Privacy Information Center previously sued the FBI in hopes of having the bureau disclose as much information as possible about the still infant system.
“The NGI database will include photographic images of millions of individuals who are neither criminals nor suspects,” attorneys for EPIC previously argued in legal motions.
And although the FBI recently announced that its massive NGI system is finally off the ground after years of development, the latest program to emerge out of Los Angeles will only amplify its scope by linking the details contained within both of those databases, among others.
Once completed, County officials intend on holding information on upwards of 15 million subjects within the Sheriff’s Department database, “giving the department a major stake in the Next Generation Identification program,” according to the Center’s report.
News concerning the LASD’s contract with NEC was announced less than a week after the Texas firm confirmed that law enforcement agencies in two nearby counties, San Bernardino and Riverside, had entered into similar biometric contracts with the company. Two months earlier, NEC announced that its Integra-ID5 MBIS platform was being leased as a service model to the Western Identification Network, allowing eight states – including Alaska, Oregon, Nevada, and Montana – to take advantage of the system.
NEC claims its NeoFace facial recognition technologist received the highest performance evaluation possible when reviewed by the US National Institute of Standards and Technology in 2013 and, by the firm’s own admission, is successful 95 percent of the time at identifying individuals out of a pool of 1.8 million suspects.
Keith Raderschadt, NeoFace account manager for the Biometrics Solutions division of NEC Corporation, previously told Malaysia’s The Star that the software can create 3D models of faces using only still images captured by CCTV cameras, and said the company’s systems have already been adopted by the likes of the New York and Chicago Police Departments.
The Hong Kong office for NEC has previously suggested that its facial recognition technology may “hold the key to facing the challenges of maintaining public order.” Meanwhile, its Tokyo branch was slated to show attendees at the 82nd ICPO-INTERPOL General Assembly Exhibition in Colombia how facial images, surveillance video footage and other “physical sensor networks” could be combined with “cyber information surveillance” obtained by monitoring Facebook accounts, blogs, message boards and chat rooms in order “to identify the true source of an attack and physically locate a cyber-criminal.”
For now, though, LA County law enforcement is expected to implement their new biometric system without using it in concert with social media surveillance.
“It could be somebody gets pulled over for a traffic violation and he or she does not have a driver’s license on him or her, and the officer is just trying to identify this person,” Lt. Thai said last year to a local NBC News affiliate in explaining the positive benefits of the system.
As NBC acknowledged at the time, however, any data being stored in such a system will, for now, stay there for longer than the length of just a routine traffic stop. According to that report, biometric information collected by the FBI on a person without a criminal record will be purged when he or she turns 75.
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Posted: 13 Jan 2015 02:22 PM PST
A Volvo manufacturing plant in Chengdu, China.
China is to start exporting domestically-manufactured Volvo sedans to the United States for the first time ever, the company has announced.
Volvo Car Group’s president and chief executive officer, Hakan Samuelson, made the announcement at the Detroit auto show on Monday.
Samuelson said the shipping of a new S60 model, manufactured in China, to the US will start in mid-2015.
Volvo was purchased by China’s Zhejiang Geely Holding Group Co. in 2010.
The new S60s are to be built at a state-of-the-art factory in Chengdu, the capital city of Sichuan Province, under strict Volvo standards.
“It’s built like a Volvo in every way. You can’t tell the difference between a Volvo built in China and Volvo built in Gothenburg (Sweden) or Ghent (Belgium),” added Samuelson.
Referring to the potential skepticism that may arise over a made-in-China vehicle, he said Volvo sales personnel around the US will be trained to assure customers that the cars are identical to those built in Belgium or Sweden.
Samuelson added that due to tariffs and regulations, the S60 will not be exported to European countries.
Volvo is currently overhauling its product line in the US, he said.
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Posted: 13 Jan 2015 02:13 PM PST


The White House proposal to encourage businesses to share data with the government on “cyber threats” would make it easier for law enforcement and other agencies to collect private information on Americans.
President Obama announced his new Internet legislative proposal Tuesday, but privacy analysts warn it’s simply another CISPA-style government takeover of the Internet, including increased data collection, under the guise of “cybersecurity.”
“The status quo of overweening national security and law enforcement secrecy means that expanded information sharing poses a serious risk of transferring more personal information to intelligence and law enforcement agencies,” the Electronic Frontier Foundation revealed. “Given that the White House rightly criticized CISPA in 2013 for potentially facilitating the unnecessary transfer of personal information to the government or other private sector entities when sending cybersecurity threat data, we’re concerned that the Administration proposal will unintentionally legitimize the approach taken by these dangerous bills.”
The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act was a 2013 “cybersecurity” bill which granted private companies legal immunity for sharing private customer data with the government for “cybersecurity purposes,” and even though the bill stalled in Congress, Obama’s proposed Internet legislation is the spiritual successor of CISPA.
CISPA was written broadly enough that Internet companies could share Americans’ e-mails, text messages and even files stored on-line with the feds.
On top of that, key provisions of CISPA were written “notwithstanding any other law,” meaning CISPA would have trumped privacy laws, all while granting companies the aforementioned immunity from civil and criminal liability.
In other words, CISPA encouraged companies to send the government their entire databases of customer data because they had no legal incentive to protect their customers’ privacy.
And Obama’s legislative proposal, which also weakens state data breach laws while increasing penalties under existing federal fraud laws, is nothing more than CIPSA with a new name.
“Introducing information sharing proposals with broad liability protections, increasing penalties under the already draconian Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and potentially decreasing the protections granted to consumers under state data breach law are both unnecessary and unwelcome,” the EFF added.
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Posted: 13 Jan 2015 02:06 PM PST


US House Speaker John Boehner has warned President Barack Obama over his actions on immigration policies in the country.
At a Tuesday meeting of dozens of congressional leaders, Boehner said that the House would make efforts to stop the actions.
He “made clear” that a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spending bill would “include amendments to stop the president’s unilateral actions on immigration,” said a readout from the Speaker’s office.
“The speaker reminded the president that he himself had stated publicly many times in the past that he did not have the power to rewrite immigration law through executive action,” it added.
“There are priorities that rise above politics,” said the president in response, according to the White House, and they include “fully funding the Department of Homeland Security without delay so the men and women working there can operate with the confidence they need.”
Late last year, Obama announced an extensive set of executive actions on US immigration policy under which parents of US citizens could apply for work permits and those who came illegally to the United States as children would be protected.
The actions are designed to spare from deportation as many as 5 million undocumented immigrants in the US.
The administration does not believe the orders are unconstitutional and says they are perfectly within the president’s authority.
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Posted: 13 Jan 2015 01:51 PM PST
The leader of the Islamist extremist group Boko Haram Abubakar Shekau (C) delivering a speech.
Boko Haram has grown from a small terror group to a mini-country with its own territory, which can be compared to gains made by the Islamic State (IS). Boko Haram now controls an area the size of Costa Rica or Slovakia.
The militant group’s territory now totals about 52,000 square kilometers, according to an estimate released by The Telegraph.
One of the latest towns to be captured by the group was Baga in the northeastern Nigerian state of Borno, close to Lake Chad. According to witness estimates, Boko Haram militants killed at least 2,000 people there, although the Nigerian military later put the figure at 150.
Amnesty International said the attack could be the deadliest by the group since it surfaced in 2009.
“For five kilometers, I kept stepping on dead bodies until I reached Malam Karanti village [near Baga], which was also deserted and burnt,” a surviving fisherman told AFP.
The militants currently control over 11 local government areas with more than 1.7 million people, The Telegraph estimated. Their territory stretches from the Mandara Mountains, on the eastern border with Cameroon, to Lake Chad in the north and the Yedseram River in the west.


The group seems to be copying the moves of the Islamic State, which began capturing territories in Syria and Iraq in June 2014.
Now the area controlled by IS is between 39,000 square kilometers (the size of Switzerland) to 90,000 square kilometers (about the size of Portugal), according to various reports.
After the Islamic State proclaimed its caliphate in June 2014, Boko Haram did the same in the northeastern Nigerian town of Gwoza, which was seized by the extremists in August.
“There is a copy-cat element at work here,” Andrew Pocock, the British high commissioner to Nigeria, told The Telegraph. “If ISIL [now Islamic State, also known as ISIS] can declare a Caliphate, then so can we.”
According to Pocock, the group wants “to be seen by their peers as grown-up jihadis” and to show “we can control territory, we can control a Caliphate.”
“You need a place where you can base yourself and keep equipment and supplies and, indeed, captives. It means that you’ve got to hold territory,” he added.
Boko Haram’s attacks are not limited to Nigeria; neighboring Chad and Cameroon are also among the militants’ targets. In December, the group approached Cameroon’s Far North region. However, the Cameroonian army managed to repel the attacks.


Last April, Boko Haram shocked the world when it kidnapped 276 schoolgirls during a raid on Chibok, a village in the northeast of the country. Its actions led to global condemnation with the hashtag #BringBackOurGirls going viral.
Sixty girls managed to escape. The remaining 219 were converted to Islam and “married off,” said the extremists.
According to the Washington-based Council on Foreign Relations, Boko Haram killed more than 10,000 people in 2014 alone. The violence has displaced more than one million Nigerians.
According to UN estimates released on Tuesday, at least 11,000 people have fled into Chad in a matter of days.
Boko Haram says it wants to enforce Sharia law throughout the country. Nigeria’s population is both Christian and Muslim, approximately 50/50.
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Posted by Roberto Abraham Scaruffi at 09:32